


heartbeat

by junesangie



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Car Accidents, Cardiomyopathy, Character Death, Christian Character, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dorms, Hope I spelled that right, Imagery, M/M, Major Illness, Sharing a Bed, heart surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29795754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junesangie/pseuds/junesangie
Summary: if mark doesn't reach between his ribs for the wreckage, he can't salvage what remains.it's his fault. donghyuck knows how good things crumble in his hands; why would mark be the only exception?
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Kudos: 8





	heartbeat

**Author's Note:**

> don't hate me please i just needed to angst

There’s not enough grief to go around. Not for Donghyuck; not for any of them. The news feels like a trick, something cruel and jagged made by fate’s unrelenting hands. Something ugly enough to make one sick just by looking at it.

The dorms are quiet that day, and the next, and before they know it an unbearable week has passed and none of them have addressed the elephant in the room, growing to enormous proportions even without their attention. Socked feet tiptoe around him like smarter moths, like ones that know to stay away from the flames. He should be upset. Renjun hasn’t heard yet, but he looks right through him and says he’ll chew out whoever he needs to if this behavior continues.

Donghyuck sighs, and promises to think about it. But are they supposed to say, really? _I’m sorry you’re going to die?_

That feels too simple. Too much of a cop-out. He doesn’t expect much—he just wants someone to remind him that it’s not the end of the world (it is), that they’ll find a way to fix this (they can’t) and he doesn’t have to worry (he does).

He keeps it up, popping whatever pills they gave him before and after practice just to keep up with the others. At one time, he was filled to overflowing with boundless energy and sunshine, pouring out his mouth and eyes and spreading, totally contagious, in his laughter. Now he is focused, gaze trained on the mirror as he perfects the footwork, everyone gone but the single person who’s been there from the start. 

His presence is suffocating. Because he knows— _he knows damn well_ —that this will hurt him more than anyone else.

Pretending to look bored with the repetition, Mark goes back to texting, smothered in his hoodie like one of the mountain lions they saw at the zoo in America. She’d hidden behind sparse plants and even ducked with her face between both paws. Playfully, of course, and he still wants to love it. After all this time, Mark is just the opposite.

Twice more, the music runs its loop, and he hits every beat like his life depends on it. His chest is burning, throbbing with something he can only describe as _hell_ before both legs give out beneath him.

_Hana. Dul. Set._

It’s a blur after that. Mark’s voice isn’t loud enough, and he never thought he’d want it that way. Everything moves like underwater charades and then a staggered little time lapse, unbothered and still angry in its own right. Thin, veiny hands set him upright (Taeyong). Large, firm ones slide gently behind the bend of his knees and upper spine (Johnny).

He’s in a bubble. He _is_ the bubble, and he’s fucking up his chance to freedom every time he gets it.

When sunset arrives, the blinds are kept open. They all eat dinner in the living room, together, as a family, even though it feels pointless and the takeout goes down the same way as licking an envelope.

No one talks and he feels like a baby dragon who’s about to grow into their biggest nightmare, newly hatched and already spouting fire without knowledge of the destruction he’s caused.

Except he does know. And it’s eating at him, the clearing of lightning-split trees in his chest burning as amber and rose fade into ashes and dead earth. There’s a stutter in his heartbeat when Mark squeezes his wrist, but it’s stupid, and he knows it won’t mean anything when he’s gone. At this point, he can’t tell if it’s longing or ignorance that spreads the ache between his ribs.

He blinks. The room spins, dissolves, and by the time he’s able to open his eyes everyone is gone.

Just Mark. Always Mark.

“We gotta get to bed,” he says, and it’s so gentle that Donghyuck wants to agree. A hand skates across his shoulders, pulls him close, the second weaving fingers between his own. He wants to cry. 

_You’re going to lose me. You’re going to regret all of this, and it’s going to hurt even more._

Johnny agrees to move for tonight. “The tenth floor isn’t too bad,” he insists, readjusting his grip on his pillow and a folded blanket. “I’ll be back for breakfast. Don’t need Yuta burning down the kitchen again, am I right?”

He’s a child in too-strong arms as Johnny sets down his things to pull him in for a hug, ruffling his hair and mumbling something shaky in English that he doesn’t bother to understand. It’s all so different now—time and the wasted essence of what remains. No one deserves to sit around and watch like this. 

Then again, does he really deserve to die?

Maybe there’s sniffling when they pull away, maybe there isn’t. There’s too much on his mind and not enough time, Johnny taking off before he can breathe and Mark right by his side like always.

The _You good?_ isn’t answered because it doesn’t need confirmation and they’re too tired at this point to bother. Everyone is tired, he reminds himself, but it all winds back on fraying ribbons to what’s causing his own despair. So, stumbling into bed, Donghyuck lets Mark touch whatever he likes, hair and arms and thighs he can’t help wanting to hide. After all this, he’s still more conscious of the way he looks than what he says or acts like.

It’s only a little funny, when he looks in the closet mirror and pretends not to see everything he hates. And even if he does manage to live through it, on the slimmest chance he has, an ugly scar will take the place of his biggest fear.

All lips and teeth, deft fingers steal the world and replace it with a fantasy he’s desperate to lose himself in. 

“I’m sorry,” he slurs, too exhausted for anything but an apology Mark deserves so, _so_ much. “I’m sorry for this—”

Silence greets him for a while. Maybe it’s the rush; the way it sounds like he’s in a hurry to leave this all behind. 

“You’re okay.” 

A count. _Hana. Dul. Set._ Mark is choking. Drowning, if Donghyuck chooses to hear it. 

“ _You’re gonna be okay._ ”

~

No one questions the simplicity of the next few days. Cherries are eaten and the stones hidden within crisp fruit are spit into the sink. Still warm, harder than the concrete below his window. Taeyong stays longer, more often than he can and even this fades into background static among the restless bodies unable to keep a single floor without the unpredicted visitors. 

Chenle hears the whispers from each passing member, so he doles out messages, back rubs, the occasional meal though he can’t cook to save his life. All the mumbling rises to a roar, and leaves his appetite the prey of a wolf instead of the wild beast’s hunger.

Now, he can vividly recall Mark’s enervated tone as he left just a minute ago. It rings clear, stinging easy while his focus drifts yet again. Practice might take his mind off the monotony, if he tries, maybe doesn’t lose all stability again. It might stem the wound, and yet…

“What the _fuck_ was that?!”

The sound of tires. Too many voices. A skid—too slow, too late, too _brutal_ for it to be anything but fatal.

“Call him. _Call him,_ if he picks up, he might still be inside—”

If he wishes hard enough, shuts his eyes tight, it won’t be real. Dreams come often these days, vivid and garish and taunting before he finds ensnared limbs the only prisoners of his mind.

He holds his breath, still hanging onto unshed tears and the knob he can’t remember turning, heart pounding sickly in his throat.

It isn’t real.

_Hana._

It’s all a dream.

_Dul._

You’ll be okay.

_Set._

A thick fog clouds his eyes, but he forces it down. Nothing matters; he has to see this to the end.

“ _Mark!_ ”

Someone wails, before he recognizes his own voice among the rest. And he’s collapsing, like the unstable dragon child, no air left in his lungs, all cinder and ash as

the fire consumes him from within. Nothing is real. He is not dead, but he’d be lying if he wanted to be alive.

_It should have been me. It should have been_ me, _why wasn’t it me?_

He’s already dying. The knife in his heart twists deeper, into the vein, through the arteries, severing the lifeline he’s tried so futilely to save.

Out in the street, he doesn’t need to see to know those sirens. All the blood. He’s been a witness to tragedy before—it’s pointless for the sight to haunt his dreams when the noise (the _screaming_ ) already will.

_You’re gonna be okay._

“I’m _not._ I’m _not_ gonna be _okay_ …not without you.”

_Was it too much?_ He’s sinking with the anchor at his wrists, bound and chained within the impenetrable mask. _Haven’t I given up enough?_

So he thinks love, the cruel bastard, is something horrible. Because no one should have to love a thing so fragile—so _perfect_ —that it withers the moment you need it most.

~

If something truly is worse than Mark being gone, Donghyuck doesn’t want it to be this. He never saw the pictures, the gory truth already pulsing along his insides. It’s easy to imagine for himself. But for the love of everything he knows, and the god he’s been raised to believe in—he can’t let it be _this._

At first he argued. Tried to hit and scream at Yuta when he offered rationality in what felt mere moments after the incident. _You can’t make me,_ he’d cried, voice wrecked with excess mucus and flooding saline. _I won’t do it._

And despite his bared teeth, the fire he believed might turn his tears to steam…nothing stopped Taeil from clasping their hands together and practically begging for what they’d force out of him anyway. It made a pretty gesture, a sobbing mess cradled by the promise of life. Even the eldest had no control over his words, though, no matter how quick the plea came or how close he brought their bodies.

_I don’t_ care _if I live anymore,_ he murmured into Taeil’s neck, knowing that every tear he spilled wouldn’t change a damn thing. He was gone. _Gone._

Mark, for all the beauty and sympathy he’d given, couldn’t be brought back. All those flowers on his tongue were burning, shot with dirty needles he despised more than his own unbroken bones. What did it matter? Survival gave him nothing, though a harmless lie couldn’t hurt too much more.

The second step was harder, if not frighteningly so to all those around him. He only pushed back more, despite the anesthesia, and fought valiantly against the inevitable. That was okay. It was normal, they told him and the others and everybody else who had the nerve to ask. He’d adjust to the loss, even if his downfall took blows harder than the rest.

In sleep, those same doctors cut open his chest without mercy, scalpel frigid and unrelenting and it bit through his flesh. They opened up his body, and replaced a failing heart with one he never deserved, even in the form of the only person he trusted with his life. And still that life was empty, its organs ash except a spared innocent with talons on his throat.

When dark waters part for breath, the night after only one face, he searches for the dream no one living quite believes. Even now he knows, feigning ignorance until the stitches strain at his chest and he prays in all his disarray for jagged claws to rip himself apart. The ocean calls him, but so do the lights. He decides neither is worth the effort, and lies there, unmoving until scenery changes and he’s forced to leave this ivory hell. The dorms, the streets—they aren’t much better. But Taeyong tells him in the car that, half-asleep, he’d asked for ‘home’. Donghyuck doesn’t answer. It’s not what he meant.

The bed is cold, unmade when he resists the fifth floor. Even if he nearly disintegrates into the sheets, it’s too quiet, not enough. He swears the bathroom lights flicker in his peripheral. No one’s there to prove it right or wrong, so he just imagines the impossible and covers himself in the scent and weight of _him_ without confession or ceremony in the way. 

He needs this. Needs _more._ Moonlight spills like seawater over him. Every ounce is cold, but it eases the pain. Makes it worth the numbness if he doesn’t think too hard, but of course he already has.

“I want him back,” comes the invocation snared in ropes and meters of empty cotton. “I want him _back,_ you bastard. Are you hearing me…?”

No one can. Not even himself, for the sky swallows every word he’ll speak.

  
“ _I need him._ ”


End file.
